Luhrmann has built a brilliant career by taking genres young audiences largely dread, if they know them at all–Elizabethan drama, movie musicals and now opera–and reinventing them with passionate, kinetic style. The Australian director’s first film, “Strictly Ballroom,” gave a rumba competition more bounce than a Gwen Stefani video. His next, “Romeo + Juliet,” adapted Shakespeare for a generation raised on MTV. Last year’s Oscar-winning “Moulin Rouge” beamed a dozen pop songs a century back in time. And now–before he starts postmodernizing the historical epic with “Alexander the Great,” starring Leonardo DiCaprio–Luhrmann has returned to his first artistic crush, Puccini’s 1896 opera of love and tuberculosis among the young, the poor and the arty.
“La Boheme” is a perfect fit for this 40-year-old bohemian and his production designer–and wife–Catherine Martin. As in “Moulin Rouge,” they’ve got the great romantic themes–truth, beauty, freedom and love–set to music. “What is it that we have pursued above all things?” Luhrmann says. “Money? No, because ‘Harry Potter’ pays better. Fame, fortune? No. We have always pursued creative freedom. And the price of absolute creative freedom is that people will invariably say, ‘You’re doomed. It will never happen. You can’t do that. It’s crazy’.” Still, Luhrmann isn’t apt to cough his life away in a garret. His “La Boheme” has sold out every performance in its six-week San Francisco tryout. And when the $7.5 million show opens on Broadway Dec. 8–the first traditional opera ever to play there–it will be Manhattan’s hippest date.
But don’t buy a ticket expecting arias set for twin turntables. Yes, the leads are all athletic twentysomethings rather than Voigts and Pavarottis, and Marlon Brando posters are plastered across a set that looks like Christian’s “Moulin Rouge” flat. And yes, Rodolfo’s garret in 1957 Paris displays Luhrmann and Martin’s signature l’amour neon sign, which appears in their last two films. But Luhrmann hasn’t changed a note of Puccini’s music, and the characters still sing in Italian. In fact, this is largely a revival of the production Luhrmann mounted in Sydney in 1990–before he’d directed a film. He simply wants to undo some of opera’s encrusted, alienating conventions. It took the Metropolitan Opera until 1995 to use electronic translations, and its prime tickets exclude all but the superrich. (Seats in the first two rows of “La Boheme” will cost just $20, as they do for “Rent,” which was put on by the same producers.) In updating “La Boheme,” Luhrmann has paradoxically returned Mimi and Rodolfo’s romance to something like Puccini’s own era, when regular folks went to the opera and “Che gelida manina” was a pop hit.
In this back-to-basics spirit, Luhrmann’s singers change costumes and apply makeup in full view of the audience; in order to simulate a fireplace’s glow, stagehands visibly wave a red light in Rodolfo’s face. What remains is a passionate, sometimes painful love story. “The intent of both ‘Moulin Rouge’ and ‘La Boheme’ is the same,” Luhrmann says. “To enforce, to demand, to engage the audience’s participation. Neither production is a passive experience. You have to buy into it. And if you don’t buy into it, then you have to leave. Both of them are about slapping you in the face and saying, ‘It’s now time for you to make an effort to live this experience’.”
Luhrmann doesn’t make it easy on his cast, either. Because “La Boheme” plays a throat-shredding eight shows a week, multiple singers take the lead roles on different nights: three pairings of the seamstress Mimi and the poet Rodolfo, and two combinations of the painter Marcello and his off-and-on flame Musetta. Luhrmann’s team auditioned 2,000 singers–almost all with formal operatic training–to find 10 who could both sing and act. Then he worked with them on motivation for a month before he even let them sing. “Usually, you get two weeks to rehearse,” says David Miller, 29, one of the Rodolfos, “and it’s all about traffic patterns and stock gestures–it’s like pantomime. You don’t have time to delve into character.”
Whatever the New York critics think of Luhrmann’s efforts–Bay Area reviewers were reverent–he has, at the very least, breathed new life into another cultural relic. In San Francisco it’s common to see teenagers dragging their parents to “La Boheme.” Purists roll their eyes at the miked singing, the partially synthesized strings and such liberties as the supertitle in which a character complains, “I’m freezing my ass off.” At intermission, one woman wailed to her husband, “Please, take me to the opera.” But neophytes seem entranced. Dianna and Tom Pellicer, 35 and 40 respectively, had never seen an opera before they drove an hour into San Francisco to wait another hour in line for last-minute “La Boheme” cancellations. “It’s really a simple story,” Dianna said afterward. “Everybody can understand love.” That’s music to Luhrmann’s ears; after all, he undertook the show, with its populist, united-we-sit ethos, as a response to September 11. “I just felt that more than ever, we need something that expresses the beautiful side of humanity with beautiful music,” he says. Just maybe, if it can happen on the stage, it can happen in life.
